I was excited to read this, but was disappointed upon thinking further about the results. Is progress is measured by turnover in citations? It strikes me that the idea here is linked to the great-person concepts in history. It reminds me of a retrospective I recently read by T. Lomo, who is widely credited with the discovery of LTP. He said that many people ask why his original paper doesn't cite Hebb, who is usually described as the originator of plasticity theory. His response is that Hebb wrote down what everyone already knew, and that no one in the field found it worth citing for that reason. Of course modern neuroscience and machine learning people cite Hebbs work regularly but not Lomo and Bliss. Should we then infer that the research dollars given to Hebb were well spent and those that supported the experiments were not? An alternative view of progress would say that ideas are like accretion turning into a planet - a bunch of seemingly insignificant papers gravitate together and then someone says - "wait, there's a planet here!" But they didn't create the planet, and probably many of the individual rocks already understood exactly what was going on. But in the old days the gate keepers allowed the "this is a planet!" paper to gain influence/significance, but now 50 different people say the same thing but none of them win the credit battle...
Even before Hebb, Cajal or Tanzi had suggested the same idea in the 1800s . Hebb only wrote down a vague hypothesis, but what matters is he did it much earlier than Lomo thus the disproportionate credit he receives. References are clearly not a correct mechanism of credit attribution but a very vague one, because that is not even their goal, they are mostly used for explanatory reasons.
That said, while Lomo &Bliss may not get a lot of love from machine learning experts who have a superficial knowledge of they field, they do get a lot of attribution where it matters, in neurosciences
